She Knows Asinine

Nicole Wallace was press secretary for Governor Jeb Bush and White House communications director for GW Bush. She appeared Tuesday on Morning Joe video, below) and Salon's Elias Isquith notes

while gabbing with her buddies on MSNBC: “”In the history of this country, I think months after 9/11, there were three people who we thought knew about imminent attacks and we did whatever we had to do.” Having misled viewers into thinking a huge, secret and continent-spanning torture regime was actually just focused on merely three suspected terrorists (no biggie; what’s a little waterboarding between friends?), Wallace added, solemnly, “I pray to god that until the end of time, we do whatever we have to do to find out what’s happening.”

According to the Huffington Post, the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, an Executive Summary of which was released Tuesday

.... tears apart the CIA's past claims that only a small number of detainees were subjected to the harsh interrogation techniques. The agency has said it held fewer than 100 detainees and subjected fewer than one-third of those to controversial tactics such as waterboarding. But Senate investigators found that the CIA had actually kept 119 detainees in custody, 26 of whom were illegally held. 

We must "do whatever we have to do to find out what's happening, says an incoherent Wallace. A few moments later, she would reverse field, adding "What else did we do to make sure that 3,0000 people weren't blown out, obliterated on a New York  City morning. I don't care what we did."  Upon reflection, that seems an odd statement for an individual who loyally served the president who told a CIA briefer "All right, you've covered your ass, now" five weeks before terrorists murdered those 3,000 Americans. She would know, we're to believe.

Isquith noted Wallace contended

solemnly, “I pray to god that until the end of time, we do whatever we have to do to find out what’s happening.” It was “asinine” and “dangerous” to claim that systematic torture “makes America less great,” the person who’d just implied god supports torture said. All that matters, Wallace argued, is whether torture “help[s] us kill people who want to kill us.”  But liberals, she complained, want to focus on “political correctness” — i.e., not committing war crimes.

Wallace claimed "the notion that what we do affects terrorists is a lie. It's a lie perpetrated by political correctness and liberals, and it's dangerous." But whether she meant "the politically correct and liberals," or that liberals and the "politically correct" are mutually exclusive, or that (in Isquith's words) she was "mistaking cultural shibboleths and talking points for an actual English sentence " cannot be determined with certainty.

A few hours after Wallace implied that torture "help(s) us kill people who want to kill us," a politically correct liberal from the great southwest would remark on the Senate floor

I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence. I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it. I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their suffering. Most of all, I know the use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies, our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights, which are protected by international conventions the U.S. not only joined, but for the most part authored.

Given how much the Republican Party has descended into the rathole of deceit, dishonesty, and deception the past third of a century, his was even more courageous than it seems (though it's a little hard to accuse John McCain of treason, anyway).  It's even more courageous than the statement given, shortly after approving the  Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, by another politically correct liberal who explained

Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.

The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called "universal jurisdiction." Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.

As a former presidential spokesperson, Wallace knows how to spin incoherence, God, and patriotism into one confusing, yet highly effective, bundle. The notion that somehow this makes America less great is dangerous and asinine," she claims.  Asinine and dangerous, from a person who knows about that close-up from working directly for one disreputable, and one failed, two failed Bushes.



















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